Milk & Cookies - nonfiction (in progress)

Milk & Cookies

The drive is nothing special. In a Toyota Tacoma, iPhone attached through Bluetooth to the car stereo. Listening to showtunes because I miss being in musicals. I miss the Midwest nice, now replaced with Southern hospitality.

            Middle Georgia is a snaking flow of hills. The bends and waves obscure, then reveal. Cars speeding passed on country highways. In the curve, it feels like sometimes it’ll be a head on collision.

            The playlist on the phone plays showtunes, true, but it also plays podcasts, and the contemporary rock and role. One minute your listening to All Things Considered, then Epiphany from Sweeney Tood, you made sure to download the George Hearn version so the theater community back up in Michigan doesn’t feel the betrayal of Johnny Depp’s soft inflections. Then Miss Atomic Bomb by The Killers.

            Most of the time is spent driving on I-75 on the way down and then looping in Valdosta with the east-west run of I- and then going northward on I until you reconnect with I-75 and you realize you’re almost home after eight plus hours in the Toyota Tacoma.

            And I’m sick of All Things Considered, I’m sick of George Hearn, and I’m sick of The Killers. All of those things should be blasphemy but I know on the next run I’ll need to update my playlist, stop relying so heavily on the favorites so that I smother and kill them and feel guilty seeing their silent corpses on my favorites list.

            In the bed of the truck the empty coolers shake and rattle the whole way. The radio helps, but sometimes the dead zones come and if I haven’t downloaded a particular selection, the iphone has to reach its means out into the atmosphere, snatching at wavelengths that give it juice to deliver my music, my interviews.

            The first dairy is nice, a mom and pop operation. A small farm, at least in comparison to the mega dairies that run up and down the Georgia countryside. You feel that even though the animals are resource machines that they are at least taken care of. There’s a very analog attitude to the mega dairies digital.

            I turn down the music, just in case the lyrics of Somebody Told Me are misconstrued, or maybe the journalist monotone of NPR might signal I’m of a certain breed. I don’t know what I’m afraid of, the first dairy is full of personality, of heart. Maybe some might say it’s all an operation of evil, then to that I might say this one is just a little less so.

            In a cooler of their own, right next to the milking stalls there’s a bunch of plastic tubes filled with milk. Milk that I’m supposed to transport to my coolers that are already an inch filled with ice. I take the plastic sample tubes back to the truck and lay them on the ice and take a scoop and scoop ice from another cooler to layer on top. Gotta keep them nice and cold, this first stop is only three hours in.

            Walter told me he likes to eat his lunch at that dairy. That he likes to watch the family operation because its pleasant. I look around and I get it. Its like a familiar painting you might see hanging on a hotel wall, the kind that means nothing much, but you still consider its charm. It’s almost a myth of an old time.

            I get back in the white Toyota Tacoma, I check my fuel levels, I get ready to hit play on my phone promising that I won’t skip whatever starts playing…